Sing a New Song

Here’s a quote from a great article on worship music on the excellent blog of  Daniel Kirk from Fuller Seminary :

I also believe that when the Psalmist says he will “sing a new song,” he is not actually asking the people of God for the next 4- or 5,000 years to sing his new song–old song that it is to us.

In fact, I would argue that what we see in scripture is that new song is exactly what we should expect any time that God is at work in the world. Yes, Koessler is correct: worship begins with God. But the worship we sing is, as often as not, about how that God in heaven has intersected tangibly with the world down here. Worship is not about the God who remains afar off in the heavens, it’s about the God who has, or should have, acted here on earth for the good of God’s people and all humanity.

Put differently, a church with no new songs to sing is a church where God is not at work.

A culture that cannot express its encounter with God in its own idiom is a culture where the gospel has not taken root.

And, if we’re not careful, an insistence of the singing of only the old songs might become a convenient theological cover for the reality that our own lives need a fresh visitation, that our eyes need a new vision, of the Kingdom of God come near.